The Metropreneur Privacy Policy

The Metropreneur has provided this privacy policy because we value your right to privacy. This policy is effective as of August 1, 2010 and governs the collection of personal information through this website on or after this date.

This policy describes the types of information The Metropreneur collects from its users and how that information is used. Please read this policy carefully before providing us with any personal information. If you have questions about this policy, contact us.

Information we collect.1. Unregistered users

We encourage you to register with us in order to take advantage of The Metropreneur’s many personalization features. However, you may choose not to register and take advantage of any feature of our site where registration is not required.

If you do not register, then the information we collect from you is limited. We log your IP address in order to help diagnose problems with our server, administer our Web site and track usage statistics. Your IP address may vary each time you visit, or it may be the same, depending on whether you access our site through an always-on type of Internet connection (e.g., cable modem or DSL), or through a dial-up connection (e.g., AOL or Earthlink). Either way, it would be extremely difficult for us to identify you through your IP address, and we make no attempt to do so. If you reached our site by clicking on a link or advertisement on another site, then we also log that information. This helps us to maximize our Internet exposure, and to understand the interests of our users. All of this information is collected and used only in the aggregate; that is, it is entered into our database, where we can use it to generate overall reports on our visitors, but not reports about individual visitors.

We also place a small file known as a “cookie” on your computer’s hard drive. A cookie may contain information that allows us to track your path through our Web site and to determine whether you have visited us before. However, unless you register with us, it contains no personally identifiable information that would allow us to identify you. Cookies cannot be used to read data off of your hard drive, and cannot retrieve information from any other cookies created by other Web sites. We use cookies in this manner to help us understand how visitors use our site, and to help us to improve our site. You may refuse to accept a cookie from us by following the procedures specific to your Web browser. Although you may do so, you may find that your browser reacts strangely when visiting not only our Web site, but other Web sites as well. Since cookies don’t provide us with any information from which we can identify you, we suggest you allow us to place one on your computer.

2. Registered users

If you choose to register with us, you’ll be able to add content to our site. For example, you may post your own restaurant reviews and participate in our discussion forums. In addition, you will benefit from the ability to personalize your The Metropreneur site experience. The benefits of registering will increase over time as we get to know you better and introduce new features. We encourage you to register so that you can experience everything that The Metropreneur has to offer!

If you register with us, we will collect personal information from you in addition to the non-personal information described above. That personal information may include your name, email address, mailing address, telephone number, hobbies, user name and password. The information we collect may vary, but we only collect the information that you manually enter into our forms or otherwise authorize us to collect. We may store all or some of that information in a cookie file on your hard drive, so that our system will recognize you each time you visit our site. In that way, we can save your preferences from visit to visit and present you with a customized Web site, without requiring you to log into our site every time you visit. To improve services and enhance personalization, we may periodically obtain information about you from other independent third-party sources and add it to your registration information. Additionally, authorized The Metropreneur personnel may update your registration information to accurately reflect any new information included in communications received from you.

How we use the personal information we collect.

We use the personal information we collect to help both of us! As we mentioned above, registering with us allows you to personalize our Web site so that it is most useful to you. It also allows you to log into our site automatically each time you visit, rather than manually typing your user name and password every time. We may also use your personal information to periodically contact you with news or important information from The Metropreneur, to provide you with other information or invitations related to your membership or the The Metropreneur community, and to request your feedback on our site. In addition to these periodic updates, we may email you additional materials, but only if you specifically request them. These might include opt-in newsletters and other materials that you proactively request from The Metropreneur.

In addition to these communications, if you have provided an email address, we may use your personal information to send you notifications about special offers or to tell you about opportunities available from our partners. You may opt-out of any or all marketing communications from The Metropreneur in any commercial e-mail we send or at any time.

We may also use certain information that you provide in order to present you with advertising that you may find interesting. This benefits both of us. It benefits us because advertising helps pay the bills, and we can charge our advertisers more if they know that their ads will be seen by somebody more likely to find it useful. It benefits you because you see advertising that may actually be interesting to you, rather than annoying.

You can cancel your registration with us by emailing us, and requesting removal. We will send you an e-mail to confirm your request. After we receive confirmation, we will remove your information from our active database, but some information may remain in our archives.

Disclosure of your personal information.

The Metropreneur does not sell or rent any personal information to any third party. We may aggregate personal information from all of our users and provide that information in the aggregate to other parties, including advertisers, for marketing and promotional purposes. However, if we do so, that information will not be in a form that will allow any third party to identify you personally.

Your profile on The Metropreneur will be publicly viewable and identifiable via your screen name. All The Metropreneur members will have the option to turn off the email address display features at any time.

How you can review and update your personal information.

You can review and update the personal information you have provided through the registration process by visiting www.themetropreneur.com and clicking on PROFILE in the top right corner of the page.

Steps we take to protect your personal information.

The Metropreneur has implemented security procedures to help protect the personal information stored in our systems. For example, we limit access to personal information about you to employees who we believe reasonably need to come into contact with that information. We also employ processes (such as password hashing, login auditing, and idle session termination) to protect against unauthorized access to your personal information. But please know that there is no way for us to guarantee the security of your personal information.

Children’s Privacy

This website is a general audience site, and we do not knowingly collect information about children. Should a child whom we know to be under 13 send personal information to us, we will use that information only to respond directly to that child to inform him or her that we must have parental consent before receiving his or her personal information.

Google AdWords/AdSense/Analytics

Advertising through Google AdExchange helps keep The Metropreneur and its services you use free of charge. Google works hard to make sure that ads are safe, unobtrusive and as relevant as possible. For example, you won’t see pop-up ads on The Metropreneur and we terminate the accounts of hundreds of thousands of publishers and advertisers that violate our policies each year – including ads containing malware, ads for counterfeit goods or those that attempt to misuse your personal information.

How Google uses cookies in advertising
Cookies help to make advertising more effective. Without cookies, it’s harder for an advertiser to reach its audience, or to know how many ads were shown and how many clicks they received.

The Metropreneur partnered with Google to show additional ads to our visitors. Google may use cookies for a number of purposes, such as to stop you from seeing the same ad over and over again, to detect and stop click fraud, and to show ads that are likely to be more relevant (such as ads based on websites you have visited).

Google stores a record of the ads we serve in their logs. These server logs typically include your web request, IP address, browser type, browser language, the date and time of your request, and one or more cookies that may uniquely identify your browser. They store this data for a number of reasons, the most important of which are to improve our services and to maintain the security of our systems. They anonymize this log data by removing part of the IP address (after 9 months) and cookie information (after 18 months).

Google’s advertising cookies
To help our partners manage their advertising and websites, Google offers many products, including AdSense, AdWords, Google Analytics, and a range of DoubleClick-branded services. When you visit a page that uses one of these products, various cookies may be sent to your browser.

These may be set from a few different domains, including google.com, doubleclick.net, invitemedia.com, admeld.com, googlesyndication.com, or googleadservices.com. Some of Google’s advertising products enable The Metropreneur to use other services in conjunction with Google (like an ad measurement and reporting service) and these services may send their own cookies to your browser. These cookies will be set from their domains.

How you can control advertising cookies
You can use Ads Settings to manage the Google ads you see and opt out of interest-based ads. Even if you opt out of interest-based ads, you may still see ads based on factors such as your general location derived from your IP address, your browser type and recent, previous searches related to your current search.

Other technologies used in advertising
Google’s advertising systems may use other technologies, including Flash and HTML5, for functions like display of interactive ad formats. They may use the IP address, for example, to identify your general location. They may also select advertising based on information about your computer or device, such as your device model, browser type, or sensors in your device like the accelerometer.

Location
Google’s ad products may receive or infer information about your location from a variety of sources. For example, we may use the IP address to identify your general location; we may receive precise location from your mobile device; we may infer your location from your search queries; and websites or apps that you use may send information about your location to us. Google uses location information in its ads products to improve the relevance of the ads you see, to measure ad performance and to report anonymous statistics to advertisers.

Anonymous identifiers on mobile devices
To serve ads in services where cookie technology may not be available (for example, in mobile applications), we may use anonymous identifiers. These perform similar functions to cookies. To opt out of interest-based ads, follow the instructions below for your mobile device.

Android
Open the Google Settings app on your device
Select Ads

iOS
Devices with iOS 6 and above use Apple’s Advertising Identifier. To learn more about limiting ad tracking using this identifier, visit the Settings menu on your device.

What determines the ads by Google that I see?
Many decisions are made to determine which ad you see.

Sometimes the ad you see is based on your location. Your IP address is usually a good indication of your approximate location. So you might see an ad on the homepage of YouTube.com that promotes a forthcoming movie in your country.

Sometimes the ad you see is based on the context of a page. If you’re looking at a page of gardening tips, you might see ads for gardening equipment.

Sometimes the ad you see on a page is served by Google but selected by another company. For example, you might have registered with a newspaper website. From information you’ve given the newspaper, it can make decisions about which ads to show you, and it can use Google’s ad serving products to deliver those ads.

Why am I seeing ads by Google for products I’ve viewed?
You may see ads for products you previously viewed through what’s known as remarketing. Let’s suppose you visit a website that sells golf clubs, but you don’t buy those clubs on your first visit. The website owner might want to encourage you to return and complete your purchase. Google offers services that let website operators target their ads to people who visited their pages.

For this to work, Google either reads a cookie that’s already in your browser or places a cookie in your browser when you visit the golfing site, (assuming your browser lets this happen).

When you visit another site that works with Google, which may have nothing to do with golfing, you might see an ad for those golf clubs. That’s because your browser sends Google the same cookie. In turn, we may use that cookie to serve you an ad that could encourage you to buy those golf clubs.

Your visit to the golfing site may also be used by Google to show you customized ads when you later search for golf clubs on Google.

We do have restrictions on remarketing. For example, we prohibit advertisers from remarketing based on sensitive information, such as health information or religious beliefs.

We reserve the right to change this policy should we deem it advisable to do so. If we make material changes that will affect personal information we have already collected from you, we will make reasonable efforts to notify you of the changes and to give you the opportunity to amend or cancel your registration.

Policy last updated May 20, 2016.

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Disclaimer: The information provided at The Metropreneur is believed correct but is not warranted. All information is for informational purposes only and The Metropreneur, its owners, agents, and the developers of this web site assume no liability whatsoever associated with the use or misuse of the data contained herein. Rates & offers from advertisers shown on this website are not offers from or by The Metroprenuer and their terms change frequently, sometimes without notice. Visit referenced sites for current information. Per FTC guidelines, this website may be compensated by companies mentioned through advertising, affiliate programs or otherwise.

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